Issue #2

Editorial

When considering the art field as being a raft in speculative time, the tendency is to seek comfort in numbers, regressive ideas such as another return to painting[1] or hedging bets on all sides whilst pursuing an unreasonable personal growth fetish.

These are classic reactions to a perceived risk that arises as a result of readjusting to new data. Uncertainty, if left unmediated, will pose a risk not just to market stability but to conceptual stability as it becomes more and more difficult to differentiate between artists and ads; artworks and hype-objects; or content and sponsored content – keeping us in a state of high drama too complex to decode. For example artists who consciously use marketing strategies as art are contextually mixed up with masses of artists who simply run a marketing strategy. Or, equally, galleries with a reputation for long-term quality regular- ly use their weight to inflate very short-lived speculative art. It is in these differences that art barters itself off very quickly to sometimes uninteresting effects holding us in a certain inappropriate narrative if we are not careful.

Up until a hundred years ago, it was normal to assume that all art aimed at “beauty” or varying degrees of “representation” and that anything but, would not be considered art. Later, after The Fountain, this evolved into the politics of mass production leading to whatever fallacy that we have today – perhaps a speculative bias targeted at an erro- neously projected future consensus. It may be worth considering ditching all retroactive rhetoric about “safe places” in favor of heightening one’s own form of perception (per- haps even through enhancement), to adapt to the new environment and to filter through informational debris.

Kenny Schachter

Art After the Apocalypse

I don’t think expectations were ever high in relation to the loosely denominated money-movement called Zombie Formalism (hereafter, ZF), but perhaps the precipitousness of the fall surprised some expecting a slower decline. In another sense, bland stylization in art has existed forever and nothing in the foreseeable future will change that, ever.

In uncertain economic times, many art collectors are moving towards safer pieces, encompassing the strategy of buying minor works and/or drawings by famous artists instead of young art, e.g. modern masters like Calder, Dubuffet and Picasso, and classic contemporaries like Warhol, Wool and Basquiat.

Out of the young hot-lot from only a few years ago, who were unashamedly propped by a gang of market buffoons since all but dissipated, will any careers be sustainable?... [buy]

Armen Avanessian

The basic condition of our culture and of our technological world, which means also our daily life, can maybe be described as post-contemporary. We no longer live in a world where we have access to the present, instead the direction of time itself has changed – where, in our present 21st century, time in the most fundamental ontological sense, comes from the future and not from the past. We can not understand our present, or gain trac- tion in it, by only explaining the present through comparisons with the past. Instead what the concept of the “post-contemporary condition” is trying to grasp is how the present is coming from the future and why time cannot be understood with traditional philosophi- cal tools or time philosophical concepts any longer.... [buy]

Joseph Walsh

An Image that is Nothing to be Desired

Roland Barthes’ The Neutral is a series of lectures from 1978 defining his idea of the neutral.1 Referencing literature, philosophy and personal anecdotes, The Neutral sets out to outplay and baffle paradigms that produce meaning in western thought – its “law, arrogances and wills-to-possess.”

I would like bring this into the context of the current paradigm of the professionaliza- tion and micro-managing of the self impinging upon the artist as well as the psyches of us all in general. As a way of existing with this, I would like to bring in elements of Barthes’ The Neutral as potential spaces or settings for attention to one another, that are necessary for us to be in contact with each other, for agile creativity to happen, that would be of and for the continuation of this space.... [buy]